The Infinite Staircase takes on two mega-topics—metaphysics and ethics—connecting the two by positing that ethics represent strategies for living that align our behavior with metaphysics, the powers that be.  Esthetics, in contrast, does not get much attention in the book beyond a passing glance in a chapter on culture, where, from an evolutionary perspective, it is associated with “good tricks.”  It deserves more than that, and this essay is my contribution to the dialog. 

The form of this essay represents something of an experiment.  Rather than build it on its own, I have taken the liberty of using the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy’s entry on esthetics as a framing device where all I have to do is insert commentary between paragraphs.  The CDP is the dictionary of philosophy that I read and reread as I was writing The Infinite Staircase, and I deeply appreciate the quality and conciseness of its entries, as well as its balanced approach to controversial issues.  That makes it a perfect sounding board for those of us who do want to be controversial, at least at times.  With that in mind, here goes.

CDP: Aesthetics: the branch of philosophy that examines the nature of art and the character of our experience of art and of the natural environment.

GM: Actually, I take exception to this definition as the domain of esthetics.  I think the nature of art is better addressed by the philosophy of art and art criticism.  Esthetics first and foremost should be defined instead as that branch of philosophy that examines the nature of our experience of beauty regardless of its source.  Art in this context is a subset of esthetic experiences, and it must not be allowed to dominate the narrative from the outset.

CDP: It emerged as a separate field of philosophical inquiry during the eighteenth century in England and on the Continent. Recognition of aesthetics as a separate branch of philosophy coincided with the development of theories of art that grouped together painting, poetry, sculpture, music, and dance (and often landscape gardening) as the same kind of thing, les beaux arts, or the fine arts.

GM: Yes, historically this is what happened.  As a result, esthetics became embedded within an elitist vision of culture enmeshed in issues of taste, class, and status—games of social power that are outboard of the esthetic experience per se.  Esthetics is better understood as a subset of culture. 

Culture, as described in The Infinite Staircase, embodies strategies for living that are transmitted socially through imitation rather than genetically through inheritance.  All human societies incorporate culture in this sense, so far from being elite, it is actually pervasive.  Esthetics is an analytical discipline that focuses on a subset of culturally transmitted experiences which impact the quality of psychological and social life and thus have strategic import.  The question is, how can we properly characterize this subset?

I propose that esthetic experiences are a subset of the class of experiences philosophers call qualia.  Qualiaare intimate subjective experiences evoked by objects of engagement where the subjective experience can vary between persons or across periods of time even when the object encountered does not.  Proust’s madeleine is a famous example. 

Qualia are pre-linguistic, arising out of the interaction of desire, consciousness, and values, all of which we experience prior to our acquisition of language as we witness in the behavior of toddlers and pets.  This makes them inherently more intimate than any experience that is linguistically transmitted, and it is this intimacy which at once fascinates and frustrates philosophers who want to bring it under the control of language.  Their goal is to derive esthetics from analytics.  This is what the eighteenth century set out to do, but it just did not work.

To be clear, it is not that qualia defy analysis—it is simply that they precede it.  When people try to derive qualia from analytics, they are approaching things from the wrong end.  Emergence operates in one direction only, from a domain of lesser complexity to one of greater, from qualia to analytics, not the other way around.  Analytics excels at deconstructing complex things into their component elements, but it is unable to reassemble them into their integrated, organic, pre-analyzed state. 

With respect to esthetics in particular, we are interested in that subset of qualia associated with the experience of beauty, or its opposite, ugliness, or anything that can be located on a spectrum spanning the two.  In parallel, we should note there are other qualia that create similar emotional reactions as beauty, including wonder, love, joy, and enlightenment, along with their opposites of disgust, hatred, despair, and confusion.  All these spectra of emotions linger around the edges of esthetics, but for our purposes the focal point should be the experience of beauty itself and its impact on our strategies for living.

CDP: Baumgarten coined the term ‘aesthetics’ in his Reflections on Poetry (1735) as the name for one of the two branches of the study of knowledge, i.e. for the study of sensory experience coupled with feeling, which he argued provided a different type of knowledge from the distinct, abstract ideas studied by “logic.” He derived it from the ancient Greek aisthanomai (to perceive), and “the aesthetic” has always been intimately connected with sensory experience and the kinds of feelings it arouses.

GM: Baumgarten correctly identifies the two relevant fields operating here.  In the context of The Infinite Staircase’s hierarchy of emergence, “sensory experience coupled with feeling” equates to qualia.  Qualia, in turn, are registered at the intersection of consciousness and value prior to any engagement with language.  So, we need to keep our language-inflected analytical intellect humble here.  Too much arrogance will create a backlash of the sort exemplified by Wordsworth’s accusatory, “We murder to dissect.” 

In contrast with qualia, philosophical engagement with esthetics emerges at the level of language and operates at the levels of narrative and analytics.  These higher levels of intellectual involvement seek to understand qualia in relation to taste.  Constructing a social consensus around taste is something all cultures do, in part as an element of social bonding but also to better understand the impact of esthetic experiences on everyone’s wellbeing.  Taste is the domain of esthetic judgments, typically developed by two or more people comparing experiences with one or more objects of interest.  The goal is to establish criteria which are independent of personal preference, rooted instead in shared observations. 

CDP: Questions specific to the field of aesthetics are:

Is there a special attitude, the aesthetic attitude, which we should take toward works of art and the natural environment, and what is it like?

GM: The word attitude has connotations of an elitist social posturing that often hovers around conversations about taste.  Part of the challenge is that analytics by necessity interrupt the esthetic experience of qualia, not only in the moment but even after the fact when we are using memory to recall it.  Our goal in this exercise, referencing Wordsworth again, is to engage with “emotions recollected in tranquility.”  Esthetic analysis functions best when we let the object of interest make impressions upon us in as unimpeded a way as possible.  We can then recall those impressions at a later date to use as data.  During the experience itself, we need to be as directly aware of qualia as we can be, and that implies deferring the application of language.  The esthetic attitude needs to be one of innocence.  The more innocent the data collection, the more reliable the subsequent analysis.

Conversely, when we are in a conversation about a work of art, we are not experiencing its beauty, we are attempting to dissect its esthetics.  This is the purpose of art criticism.  We seek to understand the force that comes from art by sharing hypotheses about its dynamics to see if others will validate our ideas.  Over time we seek to build a philosophy of art, a body of knowledge that accounts for art’s impact on human affairs.  This also requires a special attitude, one of intellectual curiosity, openness to ideas, and a willingness to suspend judgment under conditions of ambiguity.  We can term this attitude critical, but we need to steer clear of it being prejudicial or judgmental.

Part of the challenge with esthetic judgments is that they can become entangled with identity themes.  When this occurs, they cease to be negotiable because they have become intrinsic to our self-image.  It is no accident that we prefer the company of friends who share our tastes.  Disagreements about esthetic judgments create lines of social demarcation, something readily seen in each generation’s tendency to reject the prior one’s taste in music, clothing, or beverages.  By so doing, the new esthetic becomes a platform for social cohesion for the emerging group, creating a body of referenceable material for framing all kinds of life situations.  The point is that there is a lot more at work here than simple esthetic judgments, so we need to keep a sharp eye out for boundaries.

CDP: Is there a distinctive type of experience, an aesthetic experience, and what is it?

GM: Yes, there is.  As already mentioned, it is a member of the experience class called qualia, which are units of experience that are real, separable, and identifiable, but which are pre-linguistic, and thus evade being readily captured in words.  We can apply words to them, but we cannot replicate them in words. 

In The Infinite Staircase I make the case that qualia emerged prior to humanity, playing the role of ideas within an animal theory of mind.  In this context, they are remembered experiences which guide the animal in achieving homeostasis.  The object of homeostasis is to embrace and sustain good feelings and distance oneself as much as possible from bad ones.  This accounts for how animals develop eating preferences, for example, as well as how they find places to bed down or burrow in, or how they select a potential mating partner.  Ceaseless pursuit of homeostasis, combined with the pressures of natural and sexual selection, leads to strategically superior outcomes that are transmitted genetically and, among mammals as well as birds, socially as well.

As mammals, we humans inherit this set of mental faculties at birth and demonstrate them long before we acquire language.  That is, for the first year of our life we enact an animal theory of mind while ceaselessly pursuing homeostasis.  Over time, our acquisition of language overwrites these experiences with verbal interpretations.  These can become so compelling that we lose direct access to the underlying qualia.  We can recover this access by exercising our non-verbal awareness through practices like mindfulness or daydreaming, thereby bringing a “beginner’s mind” to esthetic experience.  That level of innocence is critical to enabling a direct perception of qualia.

Specifically, with respect to esthetic qualia, we are interested in the non-verbal experience of beauty.  How is that different from, say, the non-verbal experiences of peacefulness, joy, awe, or simply pleasure?  This is where investigating the intersection with art can be fruitful.  Much art (although not all) seeks to elicit an experience of beauty, and some artifacts are more successful than others at doing so.  The attributes that contribute to their success include form, color, texture, flavor, tone, arrangement, juxtaposition, and perspective.  Each attribute represents a set of possibilities within which there resides what I will call a “homeostatic mean.” 

Take form, for example, the arch of a bridge.  Any given arch could be a little bit longer or shorter, higher or lower.  The architect starts by intuitively finding the dimensions that most accord with the other elements of the structure.  That is a pure homeostatic mean.  But there is still the possibility of deliberately departing from that mean, creating a tension that either increases or decreases the esthetic impact.  That is, the artist can play off against a homeostatic mean.  If the object is too regular, it will be taken for granted, and perception will be suppressed, freeing attention to go elsewhere.  If it is too irregular, on the other hand, it will get rejected as incomprehensible, and again perception is suppressed because we just can’t process the input.  But if it hovers between the two, then it can capture our attention and stimulate us to dwell on the experience. 

This kind of dynamic tension is at work with all the attributes beauty.  When color combinations match perfectly, we register the effect but do not explore it.  Same with combinations of flavors, textures, and tones.  Same with arrangements and juxtapositions.   A dynamic tension between expectation and fulfillment creates intrigue, and that is what engages us to explore the experience further, to return to it later, and to want to talk to others about it.  Beauty is dynamic in this sense, not static.

CDP: Is there a special object of attention that we can call the aesthetic object?

GM: Yes and no.  Esthetic experience is initiated by sensory engagement, typically with something external to ourselves.  In such a case, there is necessarily an object involved.  However, there is no object that is either inherently esthetic or inherently non-esthetic.  The context in which the object is encountered determines whether or not beauty is experienced.

The alternative concept, that beauty is an attribute of an object, does not hold up because our experience of beauty is not stable.  That is, unlike our experience of the color red, a truly objective attribute which is stable, our experience of beauty is evanescent, testifying to a subjective dimension that cannot be divorced from the object of attention.  Beauty, in other words, is a phenomenon, a union of subjective and objective experience.    

Stepping back, the very question of whether there could be an esthetic object shows how merging esthetics with the philosophy of art can lead us astray.  When we focus on an object with the predisposition that it is esthetic in and of itself, we lock ourselves into the domain of analytics and lose touch with the domain of qualia.  Taken to extremes, as it has been, for example, in the philosophy of deconstruction, locking into analytics can give rise to a disorienting concern that human experience is trapped inside an infinite series of cultural “texts” from which there is no escape, along the lines of Marcel Marceau’s mime being trapped inside an invisible cage.

A better way to think about the roots of our objective engagement with beauty is to reflect on how it might have evolved from sexual selection.  All mammals make strategic decisions in choosing mating partners, and these decisions are influenced by factors that, from the point of view of natural selection, are epiphenomena.  Because we are mammals, our brains are wired to process these epiphenomena intimately, and they impact our identities and our fates, not to mention our offspring’s as well.  In this scenario, beauty came into being as an attention grabber, as a lure, as an invitation, one that leads to success in mating—in short, a tactical tool that enhances one’s strategy for living.  Many esthetic objects can be seen as an artifact of this process.  It should not be surprising, therefore, that we assign a high importance to such objects—our hormones have predisposed us to do so.

CDP: Finally, is there a distinctive value, aesthetic value, comparable with moral, epistemic, and religious values?

GM: Yes.  What all four domains share are roots in a pre-linguistic experience of value, what we typically call feelings.  Feelings and qualia are virtually synonymous in my view—qualia being felt experiences.  Our intuition that there is a truth in feelings that transcends verbal analysis represents out animal mind at work, spontaneously and perpetually seeking emotional homeostasis, in collaboration with our analytically oriented intellect.  While both domains are electrochemical, feelings are generated by hormonal messaging whereas thoughts rely more on electrical signals.  The former is more pervasive, the latter more immediate.  Because much of our daily life demands immediate responses, feelings often get suppressed, and this can lead us to lose touch with them.

When we are experiencing beauty, we seek to regain that connection.  To do so, we unconsciously make slight alterations either to our point of view or to the arrangement of the object of our attention, all in service to finding a local maximum of psychological reward.  This represents the animal mind pursuing a chemically mediated homeostasis within the experience.  Later, as we seek to incorporate a remembered experience of beauty into a larger inventory of memories, we associate it with memories that have made a similar impact on us.  This is how we build our internal definition of beauty, and cumulatively, our personal taste.  This represents a second-order electrically-mediated search for homeostasis around a linguistically-enabled worldview, a stabilizing sense of our identity, of who we are.

What makes esthetic experiences so important is that they build connections between these two domains of consciousness, one immersed in the immediacy of phenomena, the other positioned abstractly above—a floor person and a ceiling person, if you will.  The two interoperate, but intellect has a speed advantage over the slower going domain of feelings.  As noted above, this can lead to us losing touch with the latter, and esthetic experiences are one way we can reintegrate.

CDP: Some questions overlap with those in the philosophy of art, such as those concerning the nature of beauty, and whether there is a faculty of taste that is exercised in judging the aesthetic character and value of natural objects or works of art.

GM: Again, we must be careful here.  The phrase “a faculty of taste” has elitist connotations that imply that sensibility is developed through education and refinement, that feelings are ultimately subordinate to analysis.  This puts the cart before the horse.  It is not that analytical commentary is not worthwhile, or that such commentary will not reveal degrees of sensitivity and appreciation.  It is just that analysis per se is not at the core of the experience, nor can it substitute for it.

That said, what can we say about the experience of beauty per se?  We have already noted it is a phenomenon, meaning it involves an interaction between subject and object.  We can now note that this interaction is characterized by attraction.  Beauty attracts not only our notice but our sustained attention.  We don’t just observe it.  We seek to explore it, even participate in it, through our awareness.  As with sexual selection, we are engaged in a subject-to-subject interaction involving sustained, vulnerable attention to something outside ourselves, be that a person or an object of contemplation.  In both situations we are getting hormonal reinforcement to continue the experience.  While sexual attraction is decidedly more physical, and attraction to beauty more ethereal, both represent an underlying dynamic of desire in search of fulfillment. 

To go beyond this, to analytically characterize the attributes of beautiful objects we experience as beautiful, we need to inspect the data we are using.  We are not talking about objective facts.  The useful data to review comes instead from recollecting subjective impressions.  Impressions, by definition, are the residue of a force making an impact on a substrate.  They are the imprint forces make on the material they impress.  We can investigate the attributes of any force from examining the impressions it leaves behind.  That is what good critics do.  At the same time, we are operating under conditions of uncertainty, for we cannot tell what portion of the impression is best attributed to the object, and what portion to the subject.  Additionally, when the impression is psychological, recorded in personal memory, it does not remain stable.  Every time we revisit a memory, we change it, so again, we need to be humble when making our claims.

One property that shows up frequently among our impressions of beauty is formal balance. Whether visually as in a painting or a display, or aurally, as in a song or dance rhythm, formal balance emerges from the interplay between expectation and realization.  Expectations are created through shared cultural experiences organized around genres.  Whether it is an Impressionist painting or a rock song, each artifact can be seen as an instance of a genre.  Artifacts differentiate themselves by where they depart from the generic expectation.  Creating the right level of tension between fulfilling expectations and departing from them is central to esthetic impact.

Many of the properties we associate with the beautiful come from our sense of sight (color, arrangement, juxtaposition, and perspective), but the other senses contribute as well (texture, flavor, and tone).  We should be careful, however, not to put too much emphasis on sensation.  Sensation is the pathway that beauty travels, and that is all.  Beauty lies in the engagement of subject with object, and nowhere else.  That’s where the faculty of taste needs to focus its analysis.

CDP: Aesthetics also encompasses the philosophy of art. The most central issue in the philosophy of art has been how to define ‘art’.

GM: This is why we want to keep the discussion of art independent of, albeit clearly adjacent to, the study of beauty.  When we invoke the term philosophy of art, and then seek to define art, we situate ourselves in a post-linguistic mindset that is reluctant to yield the floor to anything pre-linguistic.  The experience of beauty is pre-linguistic, and esthetics must always keep that in mind.  That said, art deserves its day in court as well, so let’s see what we can say about it.

Art presents objects of contemplation that manipulate our perception to create experiences that are in one sense or another “not normal.”  It does so by attracting attention to both the form and content of its presentation.  The dynamic arts, those that unfold over time, including literature, drama, dance, film, and music, use genre to set expectations which the work then plays off against to create its “not normal” experiences.   The static arts, including painting, sculpture, and architecture, reference prior artifacts—previous instances of paintings, sculptures, or buildings—to achieve a similar outcome.  In every case, art plays off against a norm in order to create a non-normal effect.  The primary function of art criticism is to identify the norms that underlie the experience, describe the ways in which the artwork deviates from them, and evaluate the impact of so doing.  Context, in other words, is fundamental to the experience of art.  A urinal in an airport lavatory is not art.  A urinal displayed in a museum is.

CDP: Not all cultures have, or have had, a concept of art that coincides with the one that emerged in Western Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. What justifies our applying our concept to the things people in these other cultures have produced?

GM: As social animals, human beings operate within cultures.  It is impossible not to.  Our cultural context, in turn, will shape what we identify as art as well as how we evaluate our experiences with it.  Whenever art comes to us from a different culture, it is likely to lose something in translation, often quite a lot.  One of the jobs of the art critic is to restore as much of this lost freight as possible so that we can have as rich an experience as possible given our circumstances.  Another job of the critic is to evaluate that experience relative to contemporary expectations and standards because they will inevitably interpose themselves between us and the work.  None of this represents an illegitimate appropriation of another culture’s artifacts, so there is no need to justify it.

We cross the line, however, when we retroactively impose our standards onto the source culture and criticize it for not meeting them.  This is what all colonial regimes have done since time immemorial.  It’s what contemporary liberal culture does to past social norms that are repugnant by today’s standards.  It is simply not legitimate.  Each culture represents a collective strategy for living that must be taken for what it is or was in its own time, not for what it could have been or should have been in ours.  

To be fair, there is a set of values that transcend culture because they emerge prior to it in the evolutionary journey.  These are the values that surround maternal nurturing, paternal discipline, and communal bonding.  All mammalian cultures embody these values in one form or another, and that is what authorizes us to hold any culture accountable to them.  This is the realm of ethics, however, not esthetics.  Aristotle makes a famous distinction between the two realms, contrasting doing with making.  You can make a good nuclear bomb, but it hard to see how you could do good with it.  Esthetics is a value system for makers, as ethics is for doers.  We can apply either one or both to the same situation, but we must not blend them.

CDP: There are also many pictures (including paintings), songs, buildings, and bits of writing that are not art. What distinguishes those pictures, musical works, etc., that are art from those that are not? Various answers have been proposed that identify the distinguishing features of art in terms of form, expressiveness, intentions of the maker, and social roles or uses of the object.

GM: One common characteristic of things that might be art but are not experienced as such is that they do not deliver a “non-normal” experience.  Instead, they operate entirely within the boundaries of the normal.  This is what characterizes a tool, for example, as well as a newspaper, a water faucet, or an automobile.  Note that all of these could have an esthetic dimension—they are not apart from esthetics—but they are apart from art.  This is actually a good thing because if we had to experience non-normal elements in everything we touched, we would quickly be overwhelmed and lose the ability to operate. 

In the context of the specific features called out in the CBD (form, expressiveness, intentions of the maker, and social role or uses of the object), we would say that “non-art” has the following characteristics:

Its form is one we have seen many times before and it does not call attention to itself.There is no experience of expression, only utility.The intention of the maker is primarily pragmatic, not esthetic.The social role of the object is to enable a customary task or routine, not to call attention to it.The use of the object is common knowledge that is taken for granted.

CDP: Since the eighteenth century there have been debates about what kinds of things count as “art.” Some have argued that architecture and ceramics are not art because their functions are primarily utilitarian, and novels were for a long time not listed among the “fine arts” because they are not embodied in a sensuous medium. Debates continue to arise over new media and what may be new art forms, such as film, video, photography, performance art, found art, furniture, posters, earthworks, and computer and electronic art. Sculptures these days may be made out of dirt, feces, or various discarded and mass-produced objects, rather than marble or bronze. There is often an explicit rejection of craft and technique by twentieth-century artists, and the subject matter has expanded to include the banal and everyday, and not merely mythological, historical, and religious subjects as in years past. All of these developments raise questions about the relevance of the category of “fine” or “high” art.

GM: The paragraph above represents a host of dead ends.  We need to treat the “fine arts” movement of the eighteenth century as something whose time has passed.  In its day, it rescued art from a heritage of Puritanism that repudiated all forms of iconography as distracting at best and at worst blasphemous and soul jeopardizing.  Against this backdrop, the fine arts were shown to be uplifting, ennobling, and inspiring—very much worthy of being embraced alongside religion.  Subsequently, however, this narrative became subordinated to an elitist agenda in which “taste” became an instrument of status, empowering arbiters of taste to demean social rivals as lower class. 

We need to leave such culture wars behind and get back to the perennially relevant question, which is what constitutes beauty in our culture, and where does the experience of beauty fit into our worldview.  In that context, the inclusion of feces and the exclusion of craft are overreactions to the elitist narrative and should be dismissed as such.  On the other hand, all the “new art forms” noted above can be readily integrated into traditional art criticism because all of them have the potential to play off genre to create non-normal experiences.

CDP: Another set of issues in philosophy of art concerns how artworks are to be interpreted, appreciated, and understood. Some views emphasize that artworks are products of individual efforts, so that a work should be understood in light of the producer’s knowledge, skill, and intentions. Others see the meaning of a work as established by social conventions and practices of the artist’s own time, but which may not be known or understood by the producer. Still others see meaning as established by the practices of the users, even if they were not in effect when the work was produced.

GM: All the views above are valid, and none are mutually exclusive.  The Romantics emphasized the artist and her intentions, the Enlightenment emphasized social conventions and practices (albeit of their own time, not the artist’s), and the Moderns emphasized the users, such as the reader-response criticism championed by I. A. Richards and others.  While cultural evolution has proceeded dialectically from one to another of these points of view, there is no reason why contemporary readers cannot enjoy a synthesis of all.

CDP: Are there objective criteria or standards for evaluating individual artworks? There has been much disagreement over whether value judgments have universal validity, or whether there can be no disputing about taste, if value judgments are relative to the tastes and interests of each individual (or to some group of individuals who share the same tastes and interests). A judgment such as “This is good” certainly seems to make a claim about the work itself, though such a claim is often based on the sort of feeling, understanding, or experience a person has obtained from the work. A work’s aesthetic or artistic value is generally distinguished from simply liking it. But is it possible to establish what sort(s) of knowledge or experience(s) any given work should provide to any suitably prepared perceiver, and what would it be to be suitably prepared? It is a matter of contention whether a work’s aesthetic and artistic values are independent of its moral, political, or epistemic stance or impact.

GM: The quest for objective criteria for judgments of taste is at the core of esthetics as a philosophical discipline.  Art is a force in the world, one that warrants objective treatment.  At the same time, art is experienced as a phenomenon, which inherently incorporates a subjective element into its realization.  Pure objectivity, therefore, is not an option, hence the expression “no accounting for taste.”  Nonetheless, art is a real force in the world, so it needs to be accounted for. 

The CDP entry correctly locates the impact of art in the “sort of feeling, understanding, or experience” obtained from the work.  Whether we like this impact is relevant but not determinant.  Experiencing powerful art can often be unpleasant.  But impact there must be, or it is not an art experience.  This in turn puts an obligation on both the work of art and its perceivers to do their part in enabling impact.  In the case of art, we said this consisted of delivering a non-normal experience.  In the case of the perceivers, we said they needed to be as innocent as possible during the moment of perception in order to have the clearest impressions to process afterwards.  Finally, when it comes to any moral, political, or epistemic stance or impact, these are all analytical concerns that are outboard of the esthetic experience per se.

CDP: Philosophy of art has also dealt with the nature of taste, beauty, imagination, creativity, representation, expression, and expressiveness; style; whether artworks convey knowledge or truth; the nature of narrative and metaphor; the importance of genre; the ontological status of artworks; and the character of our emotional responses to art. Work in the field has always been influenced by philosophical theories of language or meaning, and theories of knowledge and perception, and continues to be heavily influenced by psychological and cultural theory, including versions of semiotics, psychoanalysis, cognitive psychology, feminism, and Marxism.

GM: Given all these big rocks in the philosophy of art’s backpack, I think we are wise to keep esthetics separated from it.  They are all legitimate topics, but for another day.

CDP: Some theorists in the late twentieth century have denied that the aesthetic and the “fine arts” can legitimately be separated out and understood as separate, autonomous human phenomena; they argue instead that these conceptual categories themselves manifest and reinforce certain kinds of cultural attitudes and power relationships. These theorists urge that aesthetics can and should be eliminated as a separate field of study, and that “the aesthetic” should not be conceived as a special kind of value. They favor instead a critique of the roles that images (not only painting, but film, photography, and advertising), sounds, narrative, and three-dimensional constructions have in expressing and shaping human attitudes and experiences.

GM: This is to throw the baby out with the bathwater!  There is a self-immolating impulse in contemporary critique-oriented culture that we simply must not fall prey to.  Instead, let me recap the main points of the argument we have been developing over the course of this essay:

Esthetics is a philosophical discipline focused on the experience of beauty.It is distinct from, although related to, the philosophy of art.  Art and esthetics overlap, but each has dimensions unique to itself, and so they need to be treated separately.The experience of beauty is an instance of the class of experiences called qualia.  It is phenomenal in the sense that it inherently involves both a subject and an object interacting with one another.In the context of the Infinite Staircase model, it comes from below, not from above, meaning it is antecedent to language, narrative, analytics, and theory and is not derived from them.What distinguishes beauty from other qualia is that it is attractive and dynamic, operating in a zone of tension between expectations based on genre and actualization in the specific instance.Beauty is a force in the world.  As such, it warrants an academic discipline to study it analytically so that we may take full advantage of its positive effects and guard ourselves against any negative ones.The study of beauty is based on analyzing impressions stored in memories of the experience.  It is inherently a two-part exercise in which innocence is core to getting clear impressions and experience is core to interpreting them.Standards of beauty are culture-specific, the result of socializing esthetic comments with a view toward developing a common standard of taste.  A common standard of taste reinforces social bonds and provides a platform for investigating specific experiences more coherently.Anxiety about cross-cultural esthetic judgments is misplaced when it focuses on engagement as a form of appropriation, but it is legitimate when a given culture seeks to impose its standards on another culture’s artifacts.

What has gone unsaid perhaps is my personal conviction that esthetic environments are central to mental health and social cohesion.  Socrates is famous for saying the unexamined life is not worth living.  I won’t go so far as to say that the unesthetic life is not worth living, but I believe strongly that esthetic experience is essential to well being and that developing taste is fundamental to securing one’s identity.